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Sometimes, pre-deployment site surveys are performed by moving about a single AP and testing coverage every time you change the AP location. This method is often referred to as "AP-on-a-stick." The purpose of this method is to find good locations for future AP installations and estimate expected coverage.
If you perform such surveys using one floor plan, the results will not be ideal because TamoGraph assumes that your AP location is fixed; it will place only a single AP icon in the estimated location and the coverage calculations will be based on that estimated location. This is not what you want when you perform AP-on-a-stick surveys; you probably want TamoGraph to treat your test AP as a unique physical device in each of the surveys conducted.
To address this problem, we suggest one of the following solutions (we recommend the second solution):
1. You can add multiple copies of the same floor plan to the project. Every time you move the test AP to a new location, perform a survey using a new copy of the floor plan. By doing so, you will obtain completely independent coverage results for each new location. The drawback of this method is that you will not be able to see cumulative coverage visualization on a single floor plan.
2. You can perform all the surveys using the same floor plan. When you complete the testing cycle (new AP location – new survey – new AP location – new survey…), you can split a single physical AP into multiple copies, one copy per survey. All AP copies will be assigned new, unique MAC addresses, and, therefore, TamoGraph will treat them as independent APs. To do that, select your test AP on the left panel, right-click on it, and then select Advanced => Split. This will display a dialog window in which you can select two or more surveys that you performed using the AP-on-a-stick method. Click OK to complete the operation. If you have a dual-band AP, you will need to perform this operation twice, once for each band.
After the split, new APs are given new names and new MAC addresses. For example, if the original AP name is "Cisco 802.11n" and the original MAC address is 00:23:04:88:C6:90, and if your performed three surveys in three different locations, the new APs would be named "Cisco 802.11n – Copy 1," "Cisco 802.11n – Copy 2," and "Cisco 802.11n – Copy 3," and their MAC addresses would be 00:23:04:88:C6:91, 00:23:04:88:C6:92, 00:23:04:88:C6:93, respectively.
Once you split the AP into multiple independent, unique APs, you can adjust AP icon locations to reflect their actual positions, as described in the previous chapter, and apply any visualization to the selected surveys.
Note that this operation cannot be undone, so you may want to save a backup copy of the project file prior to performing this operation.
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